


Perpetual Motion Machine

by anthrop



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Alphonse "let's fuck around and find out" Elric is here to have a good epilogue and that is a threat, Gen, Soul Alchemy, Soul-Searching, yes that's a joke tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:01:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28490586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/pseuds/anthrop
Summary: He really does try to brush it off, to get them out of the house so he can figure out whatever the fuck is happening on his own, but when he tries to wave them off the disconnect between simultaneously inhabiting a human body andnothits him like a blow to the head. He staggershard.The next thing he's peripherally aware of is Winry and Edward helping him back to the dining table, alternating between babbling sweet nothings and panicked everythings in his ears, all while watching himself get strong-armed into a chair from across the room. They're both loudly asking him variations of what the fuck, so he swallows until he can trust his voice and tells them with as much urgency as he can muster,"Frying pan."They boggle at him. "What?""I'minthe frying pan.""What?"
Comments: 8
Kudos: 93
Collections: FMA Secret Santa 2020





	Perpetual Motion Machine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wolfink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolfink/gifts).



> Written for the FMA Secret Santa Exchange over on Tumblr! My giftee asked for some Elric fun so I decided to go with an idea I've been wanting to play with for a while now. If you've seen CoS you'll know where I'm coming from but if you haven't no worries! This isn't an actual crossover between the two series; I just wanted to play in the loosey goosey soul sandbox for funsies. This isn't half as long as I hoped to make it, but 2020 threw some fun 11th hour curveballs. Shrug! I think it sits well enough as-is and I certainly had fun goofing around with these crazy kids. I hope you all do as well!
> 
> Title comes from the Modest Mouse [song of the same name](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBtWBvmvyvs).

They're not back in Resembool two days before The Accident happens. That's not what they call it at the time, of course, but the exasperated capitalization creeps into their voices more and more after the fact and retroactively gives The Accident a kind of resigned importance. Frankly Alphonse only made a big deal out of it at the time because it had startled him, is all. After that, well, it was just interesting. Edward and Winry had no reason at all to run around like chickens with their heads cut off when it happened. It was fine. _He_ was fine, and remains fine after the fact for that matter.

It really had been an accident, is the thing.

* * *

The Accident happens just after lunch. Granny goes to let Den out and enjoy a smoke on the porch and Edward and Winry go get ready to head into town, bickering cheerfully on their way out of the kitchen. Alphonse declines to go with them, already tired from a busy morning and not wanting to slow them down. He smiles into his teacup—coffee is still too shockingly bitter for all that he can't get enough of the smell of it—while listening to their voices fade down the hall. It's when he sets his cup down that he happens to catch sight of a pan on the wall with a crack in the handle.

Well, that's odd, isn't it? It must have happened recently and neither Winry nor Granny have gotten around to fixing it, or it's not a pan they're interested in keeping much longer. Curious despite his tiredness, Alphonse eases to his feet and crutch to get a better look. It does look pretty old, once he's face-to-face with it. It wouldn't be hard to fix though, and it'd go even faster with alchemy. He's only done a few transmutations since the Promised Day and they've all somehow been both harder and easier than he's used to them being, courtesy a combination of Scar's nationwide transmutation circle and the whole inhabiting a human body again thing. It's a bit awkward with the crutch, but the circle is so simple that it's practically a background thought as he claps his hands and touches them to the pan—

—and without warning there's a bizarre sort of _lurch,_ and he's face-to-face with himself.

"Uh," he says from two disparate vantage points, and once more for good measure, _"Uh."_

He blinks with one pair of eyes. The other pair don't exist, technically, and don't have eyelids to blink with. It makes his vision jitter in a way he doesn't _think_ should be described as awful, but it's certainly not pleasant. He closes the pair of eyes capable of doing so and watches himself close his eyes with the other. Then he watches his face twist; first with confusion, then dismay, then earnest alarm. "Oh," he says, and has a front row seat to the weird show of watching his own skinny face in motion, "Oh, no. No, absolutely n—fine. This is—fine. I'm fine. I can fix this. I—oh, hell—"

The _oh, hell_ isn't directed at the situation he's found himself in, disorienting as it may be, but at the voices coming back toward the kitchen. Edward's going to take one look at him and know something's wrong, and Alphonse won't even be able to mock him for overreacting because no really, how did he bungle a simple transmutation _this badly—_

"We're headin' out," Edward shouts, and on reflex Alphonse looks at the doorway and gets to experience the uniquely indescribable misstep of looking left with one pair of eyes while the other pair remains stubbornly fixed in place. 

_"Nngh."_

Winry hears him, because of course that's his luck, and he sort of sees her poke her head into the kitchen. "Al? Y'okay?"

He really does try to brush it off, to get them out of the house so he can figure out whatever the fuck is happening on his own, but when he tries to wave them off the disconnect between simultaneously inhabiting a human body and _not_ hits him like a blow to the head. He staggers _hard._ The next thing he's peripherally aware of is Winry and Edward helping him back to the dining table, alternating between babbling sweet nothings and panicked everythings in his ears, all while watching himself get strong-armed into a chair from across the room. They're both loudly asking him variations of what the fuck, so he swallows until he can trust his voice and tells them with as much urgency as he can muster, _"Frying pan."_

They boggle at him. "What?"

"I'm _in_ the frying pan."

_"What?"_

He looks at the frying pan. The frying pan looks at him. It sucks. His body's eyes can't help but scrunch, which just makes Edward and Winry hover more worriedly over him. "I'm," he repeats with varying amounts of grimace until they shut up and listen, "I was trying to repair that frying pan with the broken handle, over there."

They both look, which means they both turn to look at him but—obviously—they don't realize that. "Okay?" Edward offers, wary.

"I told Granny to throw that old thing out," Winry mutters mostly to herself, which answers that question for all that it _doesn't matter._

"It didn't work—" Yes it did, he can see from here that it did, "—I mean, it did, but it also—I somehow, accidentally, transmuted myself at the same time—"

Edward's _"What?!"_ is closely followed by Winry's far more bemused, "How'd you accidentally manage _that?"_

Neither reaction is unexpected, but neither are they particularly helpful. What's more important is that it sounds like they don't believe him. He presses his lips together and _thinks_ about saying something, and lo and behold it's the frying pan that says, "I'm still trying to figure that out."

Naturally, they both freak out. Alphonse resigns himself to sitting there while they all but run around in circles, but then Edward has to go and get grabby with the frying pan and at least _some_ amount of Alphonse's soul along with it. He hastily drops his crutch to grab the table with both hands, squeezing his eyes shut as the kitchen goes cartwheeling. The bang and clatter of his crutch hitting the tile is unwanted confirmation that he really is hearing things from two perspectives as well. _"Put that down,"_ comes out more snarly than he means it to, but it gets the job done. Edward thumps the pan down like it's burned him, and Alphonse finds himself tripping between relief and dread that he can only feel the vibration through one half of himself.

Edward hovers, stressed to the point of literal hand wringing, while Winry gently rubs Alphonse's back. It's not really as comforting as he remembers it being, before. His skin still prickles too easily at unexpected stimulation. He shies away from her touch, pretends not to see her hurt expression, and forces words out past the lump in his throat. It grounds him a little, to focus on all the complicated bits of speaking with a human mouth. "I transmuted my soul—"

"What? How?" They demand in unison, which does nothing for the headache creeping behind his eyes. He glares at them despite it.

"I don't know, now do I? I wasn't trying to do that! But I'm attached to the frying pan, and I _—don't,"_ he breaks off to kind of snarl when Edward twitches like he's thinking about getting grabby again.

"But—" Winry falters, biting her lip. "How are you still talking with your body?"

"I'm still in here too." He forces his real eyes open, though the left one immediately shuts again despite his best efforts. Looking at himself looking up at the ceiling is disorienting as hell. He tries to focus solely on Edward's wide-eyed alarm; after a moment of wibbling, he manages to get both perspectives to line up. It's still horribly bizarre, but it's at least a little more tolerable. "I don't know how, but I'm in both right now."

"That shouldn't be possible," Edward protests. _"Splitting_ your soul? The fuck were you even trying to do?"

"I told you! Fix the stupid pan, that's all!" 

The pan in question rattles on the table with no prompting on Alphonse's part. They all flinch back, swearing. Winry's hand settles on his shoulder, light but grounding all the same. "Can you—undo this?"

"H-hold on a second," Edward yelps. "Don't go off transmuting your soul all willy-nilly! Let's think about this for a second, huh? You must've done something else besides try and fix a fuckin' frying pan, so—"

 _"Please_ stop yelling," Alphonse complains, clapping his hands. Edward ignores his polite request in favor of more yelling, but thankfully most of it's drowned out by the transmutation. There's that _lurch_ again, and then he's wholly back in his body like nothing had happened. Well, aside from Edward and Winry coming over all handsy in a way that's bruising and overwhelming and entirely unnecessary. "Oh my god, _stop,_ I'm fine—"

"What's with all the shouting?" Granny calls from the front door. "Ed? Winry? Do us all a favor and save the fight for the walk into town, would you?"

"Al's not okay!" Edward hollers back, and Alphonse could just strangle him sometimes, he really could.

"I _just_ said I'm fine, would you listen to me? And what would she do if I wasn't, huh? She can't exactly slap a plaster on my _soul—"_ Which is the entirely wrong thing to say, of course, because Edward immediately falls over himself trying to—what, discern if Alphonse's soul needs stitches via aggressively close eye contact and a lot of shoulder patting? Alphonse flicks him in the nose to get some breathing space just as Granny appears in the kitchen doorway. "I'm fine," he assures her before the other two can get a word in. "Ignore literally anything they say, it was just a bit of accidental alchemy—"

 _"Accidental,"_ Edward echoes with half-hysterical disgust. "How do you _accidentally transmute—"_

"By accident," Alphonse interrupts serenely, flicking him again.

Granny gives them all a _look_ over her glasses, like she's strongly tempted to bust out the Stray Dog a few hours early if they're going to keep this level of buffoonery up. The look travels around the kitchen, clearly looking for anything amiss, and lands squarely on the frying pan laid incongruously on the dining table. "Hmm," she says, unimpressed. "Let me know if you're up for helping me with the inventory later, Al."

"Of course," he says, though she's already done the smart thing and left well enough alone. She's his favorite.

"Al—" Winry starts, but nope, he's done being coddled for the day.

"I'm _fine,"_ he stresses. "Really." And that's enough to get Winry to back off some but Edward's still gearing up to pitch a fit. He forces calm into his voice and asks, "Could you get my crutch, Brother?"

"What? Oh, sure, here. Are you _sure_ you're okay?"

"Completely." And he's not even fibbing, because he really _does_ feel fine. "It was an accident, and no harm came from it—"

"Soul transmutation isn't something alchemists _typically_ do by accident, least of all _you."_ His tone is scathing, but Alphonse knows him too well not to take that as anything other than high praise. Edward's coming over all thoughtful in the face now, gears grinding. On the one hand Alphonse is right there with him because seriously, _what,_ but on the other hand they really do need to go into town if they want Winry to carry through on her threat of baking an apple pie so good they'll both finally have a good cry.

He stands up brusquely, tamping down the vague irritation over the fact that he can't shepherd Edward around through sheer size alone anymore. His heart rate and breathing are both fine, and the only suggestion he can physically sense that something unusual happened is an uneasy prickle in his throat. He vaguely remembers this feeling from before, associating it with the same shock one gets at missing a step on a flight of stairs or almost dropping something fragile but catching it in the nick of time. Startling, but ultimately harmless.

"Al," Edward persists.

Alphonse reaches past him to pick up the frying pan. It's as heavy as it looks, which is to say his reedy stick of an arm does _not_ appreciate hefting it around, but it's only for as long as it takes to cross the kitchen and hang it back up where it belongs. Then he turns and smiles widely at them both, because sheer force of personality comes in more than one flavor. "Have fun in town! I think I'm gonna go get started on that list now."

Winry cuffs Edward when he opens his mouth again. "Stop mother henning him. He's fine."

Edward, the undisputed king of mother hens everywhere, is clearly unconvinced. He glowers over his shoulder at the frying pan like it spat on Mom's grave as Winry shoves him out of the kitchen. Honestly. It's only once they're finally out of the house that Alphonse allows himself a thoughtful hum. 

That was certainly... interesting.

* * *

There's a lot of spitballing about the accident—not yet definitive enough to warrant capitalization—over the next couple of days. Edward really can't get over how Alphonse managed soul transmutation without any enormous cost, and considering the only examples they know of are Philosopher's Stones, a couple of dead serial killers, and _him,_ this is honestly a fair hangup to have. And Alphonse has the same hangup too, really! But his primary focus is less the fact that it happened consequence-free and more the fact that he _split_ his soul consequence-free. 

"But are you _sure_ that's what happened?" Edward asks for the umpteenth time.

Alphonse finds himself fighting the urge to smirk. "I can always transmute my soul again—"

 _"No!_ I mean, jeez, give the damn thing a rest, huh? You've done enough body hopping, don't you think?"

"A frying pan is hardly a body—"

"There's a joke here," Winry chimes in, "You know, about frying pans and fires?"

They both sneer at her for that one, but the intended effect doesn't really pay off since she goes all soppy about how Alphonse can make stupid faces at her again. 

* * *

Granny and Winry are doing their best to browbeat Edward under the knife again so they can do something about that ground beef masquerading as a functional right shoulder. Alphonse is helping apply the pressure at every opportunity as well; Edward can barely lift his arm over his head months after the fact and that's even after the surgery he got in Central. Edward, naturally, is under the impression that if he pretends hard enough he won't have to deal with it, and goes so far as to flee into town to "get a break from all this goddamn _nagging."_

"He can sleep in the yard for all I care," Winry grumbles, locking the front door and retreating to her workroom. Alphonse couldn't agree more. There's stubborn and then there's _stupid._

Still, with Ed out of the house and Winry filling the house with the sound of shrieking metal, this would be as good a time as any to do some experimentation without anyone breathing down his neck. Well. Not without a spotter. He's curious, sure, but he's not an idiot. Look what messing around with souls cost them the first time around.

He hobbles back into the kitchen after Granny, who's in the middle of making a fresh pot of coffee. "Granny?"

"Mm?"

"I'd like your help with something if you don't mind."

"Of course. What is it?"

"Mm, something pretty stupid, more than likely."

That gets her to look at him, eyes twinkling over her glasses. "Oh, I get a warning this time, do I?"

He shrugs, smiling weakly. "I'd like to try to recreate the accident with the frying pan."

"The same 'accident' that's had your brother up in arms the last few days?" Her mouth thins when he nods, but she only tuts rather than says no outright. "You'll do it either way, naturally. Well, go on, then."

He waits until she's settled at the table with her coffee, then fetches the same pan and joins her. It's still a relief to sit for all that he's hardly been on his feet that much this morning; he takes a moment to relish the burn in his legs and back, rubbing his elbow where there's an indent from the crutch.

"Should we be doing this in the operating room instead?" Her tone is dry, but it's not really a joke.

"I'm not anticipating anything as extreme as _that,"_ he clarifies hastily, "especially not with how—easy, I suppose, this was the other day."

She hums and settles back in her chair, trusting his experience if not put entirely at ease. He eyes the pan. It's just a pan, no different than the rest hung up or stored in a cupboard. He still has no conscious knowledge, Gate-given or otherwise, as to how one would go about binding a soul to anything, yet he'd managed it entirely by accident.

Well. This experiment really is just to see if the results are reproducible. He thinks of that same repairing array and claps his hands. The moment he touches the handle there's that _lurch_ again, and he has two pairs of eyes again, one still looking at the pan and the other looking at the ceiling, with Granny and himself barely in his peripheral vision. _"Nngh."_

"I assume that means it worked then?" Granny asks, wary.

"Mm-hm," he says, then frowns and thinks about saying, "Exactly the same as the first time," which comes out of the pan instead of him.

Granny twitches, half a curse slipping from her. She leans forward, peering at his face. "Are you alright?"

"Yes," he says, trying not to close his eyes. "It's only—disorienting, seeing from two perspectives at the same time."

"So you really are—attached, I suppose, to this?" She reaches for the pan, but hesitates.

"Partly, yes. I don't know if it's a fifty-fifty split, or if that's even something that can be readily quantified. It's okay, pick it up."

She does so, gingerly, and even still Alphonse has to close his real eyes against the jolt in perspective. "You can't feel that, can you?"

"No, no. It's like the armor; no physical sensations, just sight and hearing. Is there anything unusual-looking about the pan now?"

"Besides looking better than the day I bought it?" She inspects it carefully, and Alphonse does his best not to squint throughout the process. "Ah."

"Ah," he agrees, because dead center on the bottom of the pan is the same seal Edward drew to bind his soul to the armor. Or, nearly. "No circle," he murmurs. A transmutation array instead, and so inherently less stable. Without a circle to control the transmutation it likely won't last long.

He touches it out of curiosity, pulls away when he feels his vision—visions?—wobble. It’s easier to interrupt the flow of energy without a circle too. What would happen if the array was broken? Would the piece of him in the pan automatically rejoin the whole, or—something worse?

"Hm," he says, and claps his hands. _Lurch,_ and he's all where he should be, blinking rapidly at the twist and diminishing of his sight.

"Al?" Granny asks, a note of warning in her voice.

"I'm fine, thank you. You can put it down now."

She does so, and takes a moment to drink her coffee before asking, "Well?"

"Well, I've verified that this is a reproducible event rather than a fluke. Fixing this pan wasn't the first time I've transmuted something since I got my body back—" He plucks at his shirt, which he'd altered to better fit his underweight frame, "—but it was the first time I've transmuted metal, which might be relevant?” 

They both hum, frowning at the pan a while.

"This is going to be a problem, isn't it," Granny says.

"I don't know if I'd go so far as to say ‘problem—’"

She quells him with a look, then _keeps_ quelling him until he manages a satisfactory degree of shrinking and contrite, then sighs. "If you lose an arm playing around with this, don't come crying to me."

Which, fair.

* * *

This requires further experimentation—something Ed agrees with in theory but is hard pressed to just up and leave Alphonse to it. He gets the fuss—"Yes, Ed, I said _fuss—_ " but he'd prefer to determine the parameters of what transmutations may or may not trigger an extra helping of accidental possession of inanimate objects in a controlled setting. What if it happened in a fight or something?

"Who the hell are you gonna be fighting in your shape?" Edward asks, poking him in the ribs.

Alphonse swats him. _"You_ if you keep that up. And I didn't mean _now,_ obviously, but we've kind of made it a habit to get in over our heads at this point, haven't we? It's sensible to stress test this now."

"I _know_ that," Edward snaps in that particular tone he uses when he knows he's run out of logical points to argue but doesn't feel like he's had a proper chance to shout his problems away.

"Then it's decided," Alphonse says, not exactly _pleased_ per se, but there's not much to do in Resembool beyond adhere to his strict PT regimen, reread books from the collection they've shipped out here over the years for safekeeping, and help out around the house. They stay busy, sure, but life in the countryside can hardly be called mentally stimulating.

They start with compiling and then running through an exhaustive list of materials that could potentially set off the secondary transmutation, figure out fairly quickly that it's pretty much only metals that manage it, and only those that have a decent amount of iron in their makeup. Considering they're freeloading in an automail clinic, determining that specification is a lot easier than it might have been elsewhere even with Winry grousing every time he clapped his hands around her stuff.

Point of interest: he transmutes his soul to a half-configured hand made of a near-identical alloy composition as his armor when Winry's not looking and experiences almost no _lurch_ at all. So that’s something to keep in mind.

Narrowing down what triggers the partial soul transfer is also a helpful exercise in getting over the disorientation of two pairs of eyes and ears—technically only the _perception_ of a second pair of each but that’s just nitpicking—not to mention testing whether or not there's a limit to how many times in one sitting he can flip flop out of himself before hitting any kind of limit. The answer to that last one is a few, and _maybe_ one more beyond that before the headache/nausea gets to be too much, but those both diminish the more he gets a handle on the perspective thing. So a few becomes several becomes a lot becomes Edward grabbing him by the wrists, giving him a faceful of Crazy Eyes #9 ("I had little patience to start with and you are actively digging me an early grave right now,") and saying, "Let's take a break, huh?"

It's around this time that the shipment from Central they'd been expecting finally turns up. Inside it, of course, is his armor.

It’s strange, to see him again—and Alphonse can’t help but consider the armor as an individual rather than an object, after they’d spent so long as the same person. It’s more than a little surreal to see how badly wrecked he’d gotten on the Promised Day from the outside. Winry’s halfway outraged on his behalf, running careful fingers over his ragged pieces, cradling his head as if it’d hurt him if she accidentally dropped it. She and Edward have been that careful with him from the start—or very nearly; once they’d gotten over the shock of the armor’s size and severity, well, it was _Alphonse_ inside it. Of course they treated him like glass.

Den runs off with the helmet while they’re all talking. Not his head, not anymore, though he doubts he’ll ever be comfortable referring to _any_ part of the armor as simple parts. That’s alright. Den will bring the helmet back eventually or one of them will happen across it sooner or later. Alphonse’s real, human head is set squarely where it should be and can’t be knocked off quite so easily these days, and they’ve got all the rest of the armor right here to turn over to Winry.

He’d known from the moment Master Sergeant Fuery asked him what he wanted to do with the armor, when he’d still be attached to what had surely been a hundred beeping machines and three hundred tubes in Central Hospital. For all that Edward had laughed at his nervousness, Alphonse is relieved to find Winry is 100% on board with it. (“Of course I’m on board! That’s good quality steel for all that you went and destroyed it more times than I want to think about!”) There’s no way he would have been okay stashing him in some dusty corner while he goes on with his—their—life. Better to be repurposed. Better to be reforged. Better to be scattered into so many automail parts, helping people move forward after grueling loss and rehabilitation while he does the same. 

Which, well, is a nice sentiment in theory, but actually _watching_ his former body get beaten and melted down is another thing entirely. It’s just too easy to imagine still being bound to him! Edward’s just as unsettled as he is and Winry won’t stop laughing at them. It’s gratifying, to find that for all they’ve been through some things haven’t changed.

Even so, he decides he won’t follow through on asking Winry if she’d mind letting him watch her put any of those new automail parts to use. 

* * *

It’s practically the next day that Edward finally agrees to let Winry and Granny at his shoulder, and since he’ll be out of commission for a while he heckles Alphonse into tabling any and all soul alchemy experiments until he’s up and about again.

Alphonse sighs and rolls his eyes and calls him several different synonyms for mother hen, but agrees in the end. He wishes them all good luck, curls up with a pile of books near the radio, which he turns up a hair past comfortably loud, and then the three of them all vanish down the hall to prep for a surgery Granny anticipates will take several hours.

Then he laughs.

He cannot _believe_ Edward believed him so easily.

He stays put for an agonizing half hour—just in case—then eases down the hall with the pretense of a bathroom break on the tip of his tongue—just in case. It is nothing short of _delightful_ to be able to tiptoe properly again, crutch and all. He hovers by the operating room door long enough to hear beeping machinery before quickly moving on; it might not be an outfitting and Edward will be out cold for the whole duration, but Alphonse doesn’t want to spare any more brain power imagining what’s going on in there than he absolutely has to. 

Edward’s leg is laid out on Winry’s worktable, waiting for her to tinker with it while Edward recuperates. Alphonse hums at the sight of it. If he were more in the habit of making faces he thinks he’d be making a pretty unhappy one right now. It still doesn’t sit right with him, to be whole and on the mend while Ed’s still missing most of an entire limb and hard at work adding more scar tissue to his already upsetting collection. It doesn’t sit right with him either, what it cost Edward to bring Alphonse home, but both of those are two _enormous_ conversations that neither of them are real set on hashing out yet. They probably won’t be for a while, especially with the unexpected development of this soul alchemy business. 

Which! Look at him getting waylaid by anxiety and guilt again. He’s here to pilfer supplies for secret experiments, not stand here and woolgather. He grabs three smallish pieces of metal that don’t look relegated to any particular project, shoves them into his pockets, and tiptoe-crutches at top speed for the back door.

There’s a small stone bench in the herb garden, age-worn and wonderfully warmed by the late morning sunlight. He leans his crutch against it, fishing out the scrap metal as he sits. He closes his eyes, pleased that he can and pleased by the temporary peace. He can’t hear anything that might go on in the operating room out here. 

He takes a deep breath—reveling too, in the heady smell of growing things—and claps his hands. He weathers the _lurch_ with hardly a wince and settles in for one experiment he’s not assaulted Edward’s fraying patience with yet: time.

He’d thought about grabbing Edward’s pocket watch—never thrown in Brigadier General Mustang’s face despite heated promises of a broken nose and gleeful paparazzi to memorialize the occasion—from his room, but he knows Edward’s never bothered keeping it wound. Anyway, too many long nights alone have given him an excellent sense of time and he’s not interested in tracking this down to the exact second, at least not for this first test.

“Mm, I should’ve grabbed a book,” he mutters to himself. Then, fighting a grin at his own silliness, replies to himself through the bit of metal in his hands, “Sounds like a good excuse to test distance while we’re at it.” 

Edward’s not liked the idea of _this_ test either, too afraid Alphonse will fall and hurt himself even when he’s there to watch like a hawk. Well if he falls now the worst that could happen is a tumble down a couple stairs, and he's gotten enough of his coordination back that he would be surprised if he earned more than an easily hidden bruise.

He sets the bit of metal with a bit of soul in it on the bench, but an unshielded view of all that clean blue sky makes his real eyes water. He leans it against the bench leg instead, blinking through green grass. It’s not much of an improvement, not really, but it’s something.

"Well, here goes nothing," he says in tandem with himself, and grabs his crutch.

Distance Test #1 goes… fine. He doesn't fall trying to walk around, though it's a near thing beginning to end and he does totter like a drunk the whole way. He grabs a book at random and then has no way to grope around with his eyes mostly squeezed shut which slows him down even further. He does have a bad scare once he's back in the yard when his crutch bangs against Den's automail, so focused on getting back to the bench he didn't even see the dog trot up to him. Den figures out quickly that Alphonse would do better without him underfoot and backs off, tail wagging nervously until he finally eases back down to the bench.

He spends something like five minutes with his hands over his face, breathing deeply, watching Den shuffle anxious circles around the bench from ankle-height. All in all, no more than ten minutes into Time Test #1 and no sign of the array failing yet. He drops his hands and spends another five or so minutes petting Den and murmuring quietly to her. Dog fur is so much coarser than he remembered it to be, and leaves his hands tingling every time he pets her.

"Good girl," he tells her. She gives him a lolling doggy grin and collapses in the grass at his feet, obscuring the view from his soul bit completely. He finds he's not inclined to move her, so long as she doesn't roll up against the array and risk ruining the experiment.

Nothing else for it now but to sit here and wait; either for Winry to come find him or for the array to peter out. He takes up the book—a slim treatise on the applications of geothermal energy in Cretan alchemy—and does his level best to sink his teeth into it.

...As if a book he’s already read three times could be enough to distract him from worrying, honestly.

* * *

Winry finds him several hours later, having moved back inside before he could earn too bad a sunburn and already dreading Edward's drugged outrage when he sees it. He'd made the trek upstairs to Winry's room, knowing she'd know it was far enough away from the operating room not to hear anything and knowing too that she wouldn't mind the trespass.

"I thought I'd find you up here," she says, a little sympathetic but mostly exhausted. Den jumps up at once to circle around her, whining.

"Oh, sorry. I didn't hear you come up." He shuts the book, gone mostly skimmed with next to nothing absorbed, and tries to surreptitiously cover up his experiments with it. He underestimates the weight of the book, or the distance, or something; the scrape of steel against wood gives him away immediately. Winry comes over all suspicious, and there's never been any luck hiding secrets successfully from her, so he resigns himself to a good telling off and moves the book.

"Oh, Al," she sighs. 

Alphonse sinks into his collar guiltily. He _hates_ when she uses that voice. She only does when he or Edward have properly disappointed her.

“Ed’s sleeping,” she says instead of tearing him a new one. She really must be tired. “Everything went fine. He’ll probably be out for a few more hours, so try and finish... whatever you’re doing before you go see him, okay?”

“Winry—”

She holds up her hand, not looking at him. “I need to take a shower.”

Well that’s a _get the fuck out, please_ if he’s ever heard one. He nods meekly, leveraging himself to his feet and crutch before gathering up the book and scrap metal. He can’t help the grimace as he jostles his second and third pair of not-really-there eyes, and of course Winry sees it. Her mouth thins, but she doesn’t say anything until he’s at her bedroom door.

“It’s scary, y’know? We’re just… we’re worried. We don’t want you to get hurt.”

“...I know,” he replies. “It scares me too.” That isn’t the right word for how he feels about all of this, but that’d be getting into semantics. Winry’s never had their patience for splitting hairs and is dead on her feet besides. “But I want to understand it more. It happened purely by accident the first time. I don’t want something like that to catch me off guard.”

“Who are you so dead set on fighting that you’re planning for worst case scenarios like—like _that_ already? You only just got your body back, Al!”

“Nobody! _Nobody,”_ he repeats when she gives him a doubtful look. Jeez, it’s a lot scarier now that she’s taller than him. Hopefully that won’t last. “But—god, I don’t know. Ed and I—it seemed sometimes we could hardly go a week without running into purse thieves, never mind everything else that’s happened. I want to travel again, once I’m strong enough. There’s so much of Amestris I haven’t seen yet, and I want to study alkahestry in Xing one day too. I’m not naïve enough to think I’ll never have to protect myself, or somebody else, and I don’t want to be surprised by this.” He does a one-shoulder shrug to indicate the metal pressed between the book and his chest, wincing again when his vision jostles weirdly. 

Her mouth thins again, but instead of yelling she only nods tiredly. “No surprises. That includes for us too, okay? Don’t go skulking around just to avoid Ed’s yelling. You know he’ll only go off twice as loud when he does eventually find out.”

He huffs, feeling his cheeks tighten with a stifled grin for all that the conversation is so serious. He’ll never get over how good it feels to smile. “Right.”

Up go her eyebrows in an obvious, _are you serious with this?_ expression. She flaps her hand at him impatiently. “Well? What _have_ you been doing up here?”

“O-oh. Well, uh—” He tells her about the initial tests out in the garden, small increases in distance and how long it would take for the array to fail on its own. It took about 90 minutes the first time, when he’d only wandered once, and about ten minutes less than that when he went and read on the front porch. Then when he went inside he figured he’d see if he could do more than one soul bind at the same time (this makes Winry look like she wants to beat him upside the head then crawl into bed to leave Edward to deal with this crazy alchemy shit, but she just nods and gestures for him to keep going when he hesitates) so he did that in the living room, and those arrays failed within five minutes of each other after little more than an hour, so then he decided to put one soul bind down in the basement then come all the way up here to bind two more, and well. Here they are now.

“How long’s it been?” She asks, not looking at him again. He can’t figure out her expression but he’s mostly sure she’s not going to yell at him, if for no other reason than to avoid waking Edward up.

“Mm, half an hour or so?”

“And you _don’t_ feel like puking after spreading yourself around so much?” 

“The one in the basement is facedown and so was one of these,” he says, shrug-gesturing again. “It helps. Honestly, Winry, I’d have canceled these two binds at the first sign of anything weird, but there’s been nothing. I mean, beyond being able to do this in the first place. I don’t feel sick, or strained, and nothing hurts. There hasn’t been anything like how it felt when my bind to the armor was failing either. I’m a little bit dizzy, but I’ve technically got four pairs of eyes right now. That’s just to be expected.”

She takes time for a slow inhale, sighing out more explosively as she scrubs her eyes. “Yeah. Okay, sure. Just—nix it on any more experiments until Ed’s out of bed, okay? And _tell_ him what you’ve done once he’s not drugged to the gills.”

“I will, I promise.” He beams at her. It makes her go all happy-crinkly around the eyes when he does that, and this time’s no different.


End file.
